Chris Wiger leaving Denver Center for Lone Tree Arts Center

Director of patron relations Chris Wiger is leaving the Denver Center Theatre Company after 15 years. Photo by John Moore, The Denver Post

Audiences know well longstanding names in the Denver Center Theatre Company like those of actors Kathleen Brady and John Hutton. But to those in the company, and in the theater media, one name that goes right alongside those esteemed performers’ names is Chris Wiger’s.

Wiger, longtime director of publicity and public relations for the company, is leaving after 15 years to create the same position for the new Lone Tree Arts Center in the south metro area.
Wiger recently had been shifted to director of patron relations at the Denver Center.

The $18 million Lone Tree Arts Center, located a half-mile west of Interstate 25 on Lincoln Avenue, has been under construction since March 18, 2010. An August 2011 opening is targeted.

The 43,000 square-foot venue will include a 500-seat proscenium theater with orchestra and balcony seating; and a 150-225 seat flexible theater that also can be used as a meeting space or banquet hall.

Executive director Lisa Rigsby Peterson said there won’t be a resident theater company at first. The center will instead host a variety of arts groups – Stories on Stage and the Creede Repertory Theatre among them. Beginning with the 2011-12 season, the Arvada Center plans to give every one of its own works a second run at the LPAC, each for up to a month. The LTAC will unveil season announcements in late March, and tickets will go on sale in April.

“I am thrilled to have Chris join the Lone Tree team,” said Peterson. “His extraordinary dedication to patron satisfaction, and his deep understanding of the metro area’s arts landscape are going to be terrific assets to us as we prepare for our August opening.”

Wiger’s last day at the Denver Center is Feb. 25. He starts at Lone Tree on Feb. 28.

Hutton said Wiger is single-handedly responsible for bridging the gap between the Denver Center and the local community in his 15 years with the company.

In other news from the just-concluded Colorado New Play Summit:

*The Denver Center Theatre Company will change its performing schedule starting next season, taking Mondays off instead of Sundays. The move will bring the company in line with most other full-time theater companies from New York to Los Angeles.

*The Denver Center Theatre Company is always adding new playwrights into its burgeoning new-play development pipeline. Among the newest writers commissioned to write a new play for the Denver Center is Cherry Creek High School grad Laura Eason, whose “Sex With Strangers” is getting glorious reviews in its current run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Wrote the Chicago Sun-Times’ Hedy Weiss: “It is a sure bet that the option-dangling bloodhounds of both Broadway and Hollywood already are salivating over Laura Eason’s ‘Sex with Strangers,’ a smart, funny, insightful, ideally contemporary comedy of manners (romantic, literary and technological).” Also: Michael Mitnick, a Yale School of Drama grad, will be writing a commissioned play called “Ed Downloaded,” a futuristic look forward, when scientists discover a way to download brains onto hard drives to preserve their immortality.

*The Denver Center Theatre Company has pushed back its 2011-12 season announcement to mid-March.

*Denver Center chairman Daniel L. Ritchie said the ongoing but temporary move of all visiting resident artists to three area hotels will have to continue for at least another 60-90 days. Ritchie ordered the move in early October after the discovery of mold in the Brooks Towers condominiums the Center owns a block from the Denver Performing Arts Complex. During the New Play Summit, that has meant having to pay for off-site housing for an additional 100 visiting artists. The company owns 48 units on three floors of the building located at 15th Street between Curtis and Arapahoe streets. Ritchie took the cleanup as an opportunity to complete other overdue structural improvements as well. But codes have changed over the years, and the work being done is more extensive than Ritchie first expected. The relocation is costing about $4,000 a day, all of it coming out of Ritchie’s own pocket. Read more background on that story here.

*And finally, the biggest buzz of the weekend was the presence of the “Twin Peaks” Log Lady at the Summit. Catherine E. Coulson was a late sub for a cast member who dropped out of a reading of Lisa Loomer’s comedy, “Two Things You Don’t Talk About at Dinner.” Coulson played an evangelical Christian who is invited to a Los Angeles Jewish couple’s Passover Seder. For castmates, Coulson happily signed pictures of herself in David Lynch’s 1990-91 cult favorite series.

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.